Exploring the creations of Ba Jin (1904–2005), one of the most significant writers in modern China, this edited volume offers in-depth discussions of the writer and his works from a global perspective to initiate and advance dialogues between the Chinese- and English- speaking scholarly communities. The four sections of the book provide readers with a detailed biography and an overview of research on Ba Jin since the 1980s to reflect on the academic achievements of several generations in China. In addition, it includes a selected collection of articles from Korean, German, and French scholars. These articles cover Ba Jin’s life thoughts, personality, literary creation, editing, publishing, and other aspects of the research. This companion aims to provide an alternative lens for Chinese literature studies in a global context. It will be an essential read to students and scholars of East Asian studies, Chinese studies, and those interested in modern Chinese literature.

The book constructs explicitly the fundamental solution of the sub-Laplacian operator for a family of model domains in Cn+1. This type of domain is a good point-wise model for a Cauchy-Rieman (CR) manifold with diagonalizable Levi form. Qualitative results for such operators have been studied extensively, but exact formulas are difficult to derive. Exact formulas are closely related to the underlying geometry and lead to equations of classical types such as hypergeometric equations and Whittaker's equations.

Clinical toxinologic conditions are becoming increasingly frequent, more so than is generally recognized. The conditions comprise of clinical aspects such as the diagnosis, management, and prevention of snakebite envenoming, scorpion sting, mushroom toxins, plant toxins, and other natural toxins. Clinical toxinology also deals with the ecology, epidemiology, regional differences, and varieties of fauna accounting for different envenoming manifestations. This handbook includes 30 chapters addressing various topics on clinical toxinology such as the epidemiology and management of snakebites in different Asian and African countries, disability following snakebite, effect of snake venoms on hemostasis, socioeconomic aspects of snakebites, therapeutic application of snake venom, scorpion sting in the Middle East, jellyfish sting, etc. These titles are written by experts currently working in the subspecialty, many of whom have first-hand experience in the relevant research fields. In virtually all the topics, appropriate illustrations are provided to simplify comprehension including tables, figures and pictures. This reference work on Clinical Toxinology in Asia Pacific and Africa, in the Toxinology handbook series, is designed to keep readers abreast with new knowledge and experience in toxinology regionally and globally. Toxinologists, researchers, scientists, and experts in this field from various working areas considered it necessary to collect all the aspects of clinical toxinology in a single, handy handbook. This can be used by medical students, postgraduate students, general practitioners, specialists in internal medicine, critical care physicians, emergency physicians, and anesthetists worldwide.

Re-identification offers a useful tool for non-invasive biometric validation, surveillance, and human-robot interaction in a broad range of applications from crowd traffic management to personalised healthcare.

This comprehensive volume is the first work of its kind dedicated to addressing the challenge of "Person Re-Identification," presenting insights from an international selection of leading authorities in the field. Taking a strongly multidisciplinary approach, the text provides an in-depth discussion of recent developments and state-of-the-art methods drawn from the computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning communities, embracing both fundamental research and practical applications.

Topics and features: introduces examples of robust feature representations, reviews salient feature weighting and selection mechanisms, and examines the benefits of semantic attributes; describes how to segregate meaningful body parts from background clutter; examines the use of 3D depth images, and contextual constraints derived from the visual appearance of a group; reviews approaches to feature transfer function and distance metric learning, and discusses potential solutions to issues of data scalability and identity inference; investigates the limitations of existing benchmark datasets, presents strategies for camera topology inference, and describes techniques for improving post-rank search efficiency; explores the design rationale and implementation considerations of building a practical re-identification system.

This timely collection will be of great interest to academics, industrial researchers and postgraduates involved in computer vision and machine learning, database image retrieval, big data mining, and search engines, as well as to developers keen to exploit this emerging technology for commercial applications.

This monograph is a unified presentation of several theories of finding explicit formulas for heat kernels for both elliptic and sub-elliptic operators. These kernels are important in the theory of parabolic operators because they describe the distribution of heat on a given manifold as well as evolution phenomena and diffusion processes.
Heat Kernels for Elliptic and Sub-elliptic Operators is an ideal reference for graduate students, researchers in pure and applied mathematics, and theoretical physicists interested in understanding different ways of approaching evolution operators.

* A geometric approach to problems in physics, many of which cannot be solved by any other methods

* Text is enriched with good examples and exercises at the end of every chapter

* Fine for a course or seminar directed at grad and adv. undergrad students interested in elliptic and hyperbolic differential equations, differential geometry, calculus of variations, quantum mechanics, and physics

Sumptuously-filmed Chinese gangster drama set in 1930s Shanghai. Two brothers, Gang (Liu Ye) and Hu (Tony Yang), and their best friend Feng (Daniel Wu) - self-proclaimed 'blood brothers' - leave the village where they grew up to pursue their dream of making it big in the city's underworld. Their close bond is severely tested as they rise up through the ranks and greed, power and ambition take their toll. Qi Shu co-stars as sultry cabaret singer and gangster's moll Lulu.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been widely applied in a wide variety of industrial applications, including aeronautics, astronautics, energy, chemical, pharmaceuticals, power and petroleum.This unique compendium documents the recent developments in CFD based on kinetic theories, introducing flux reconstruction strategies of kinetic methods for the simulation of complex incompressible and compressible flows, namely the lattice Boltzmann and the gas kinetic flux solvers (LBFS or GKFS). LBFS and GKFS combine advantages of both Navier-Stokes (N-S) solvers and kinetic solvers.Detailed derivations, evaluations and applications of LBFS and GKFS, and their advantages over conventional flux reconstruction strategies are analyzed and discussed in the volume.The must-have reference text is useful for scholars, researchers, professionals and students who are keen in CFD methods and numerical simulations.

This book of text, cases and materials from Asia is designed for scholars and students of constitutional law and comparative constitutional law. The book is divided into 11 chapters, arranged thematically around key ideas and controversies, enabling the reader to work through the major facets of constitutionalism in the region. The book begins with a lengthy introduction that critically examines the study of constitutional orders in 'Asia', highlighting the histories, colonial influences, and cultural particularities extant in the region. This chapter serves both as a provisional orientation towards the major constitutional developments seen in Asia - both unique and shared with other regions - and as a guide to the controversies encountered in the study of constitutional law in Asia. Each of the following chapters is framed by an introductory essay setting out the issues and succinctly highlighting critical perspectives and themes. The approach is one of 'challenge and response', whereby questions of constitutional importance are posed and the reader is then led, by engaging with primary and secondary materials, through the way the various Asian states respond to these questions and challenges. Chapter segments are accompanied by notes, comments and questions to facilitate critical and comparative analysis, as well as recommendations for further reading.The book presents a representative range of Asian materials from jurisdictions including: Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, South Korea, Sri Lanka , Taiwan, Timor-Leste and the 10 ASEAN states.

Data hiding is designed to solve the problem of secure information exchange through networks such as Internet. In that, reversible data hiding is the good technique for recovering original images without any distortion after secret data are extracted from the stego image. This technique continues to attract attention from many researchers. In this work, three reversible data hiding schemes are proposed to embed secret data into the VQ and SMVQ compressed image.

Knowledge sharing has become an important issue in knowledge management. Here, we reclassify knowledge according to its social value and economic value. In practice, many organizations regard employee's knowledge as an intangible asset. However, most people think, knowledge is their competitive advantage. If they share their knowledge with other people, they may lose their competitive ability and thus are often unwilling to share their knowledge. This book investigates into how human resource management practices influence the employees' knowledge sharing behavior and intention with respect to the social and economic value of the knowledge. Furthermore, we give evidence for the correlation between different employment contract types and employees' knowledge sharing behavior and intention with respect to socially valuable or economically valuable knowledge. It is important that we provide organizations a way to encourage their employees to contribute their knowledge to the organization. It should be useful to professionals in Knowledge Sharing field, practitioner in human resource management, or anyone else who may be interested in knowledge sharing.

Privacy and Copyright protection is a very important issue in our digital society, where a very large amount of multimedia data are generated and distributed daily using different kinds of consumer electronic devices and very popular communication channels, such as the Web and social networks. This book introduces state-of-the-art technology on data hiding and copyright protection of digital images, and offers a solid basis for future study and research. Steganographic technique overcomes the traditional cryptographic approach, providing new solutions for secure data transmission without raising users' malicious intention. In steganography, some secret information can be inserted into the original data in imperceptible and efficient ways to avoid distortion of the image, and enhance the embedding capacity, respectively. Digital watermarking also adopts data hiding techniques for copyright protection and tampering verification of multimedia data. In watermarking, an illegitimate copy can be recognised by testing the presence of a valid watermark and a dispute on the ownership of the image resolved. Different kinds of steganographic and watermarking techniques, providing different features and diverse characteristics, have been presented in this book. This book provides a reference for theoretical problems as well as practical solutions and applications for steganography and watermarking techniques. In particular, both the academic community (graduate student, post-doc and faculty) in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Applied Mathematics; and the industrial community (engineers, engineering managers, programmers, research lab staff and managers, security managers) will find this book interesting.

This book analyses the equal citizenship claims of women and sexual and gender diverse people across several Asian jurisdictions. The volume examines the rich diversity of constitutional responses to sex, gender, and sexuality in the region from a comparative perspective. Leading comparative constitutional law scholars identify ‘opportunity structures’ to explain the uneven advancement of gender equality through constitutional litigation and consider a combination of variables which shape the diverging trajectories of the jurisdictions in this study. These variables include: - constitutional structures - the composition and powers of the courts - regional constitutional isomorphism - the incorporation of international and regional human rights standards - hermeneutic traditions - colonial legacies - foreign influences - social structures and hierarchies - forms of gendered and/or religious nationalism. The authors also embed the relevant constitutional and legal developments in their historical, political and social contexts. This deep contextual understanding of the relationship between sex, gender, sexuality, and constitutionalism greatly enriches the analysis. The case studies reflect a variety of constitutional structures, institutional designs, and contextual dynamics which may advance or impede developments with respect to sex, gender, and sexuality. As a whole, the chapters further an understanding of the constitutional domain as a fruitful site for advancing gender equality and the rights of sexual and gender diverse people. The jurisdictions covered represent all Asian sub-regions including: East Asia (Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea), South East Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and Indonesia), and South Asia (India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). The introductory framework chapter situates these insights from the region within the broader global context of the evolution of gender constitutionalism.

This unique professional volume is about the recent advances in the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). It introduces a new methodology, namely the simplified and highly stable lattice Boltzmann method (SHSLBM), for constructing numerical schemes within the lattice Boltzmann framework. Through rigorous mathematical derivations and abundant numerical validations, the SHSLBM is found to outperform the conventional LBM in terms of memory cost, boundary treatment and numerical stability.This must-have title provides every necessary detail of the SHSLBM and sample codes for implementation. It is a useful handbook for scholars, researchers, professionals and students who are keen to learn, employ and further develop this novel numerical method.

Sub-Riemannian manifolds are manifolds with the Heisenberg principle built in. This comprehensive text and reference begins by introducing the theory of sub-Riemannian manifolds using a variational approach in which all properties are obtained from minimum principles, a robust method that is novel in this context. The authors then present examples and applications, showing how Heisenberg manifolds (step 2 sub-Riemannian manifolds) might in the future play a role in quantum mechanics similar to the role played by the Riemannian manifolds in classical mechanics. Sub-Riemannian Geometry: General Theory and Examples is the perfect resource for graduate students and researchers in pure and applied mathematics, theoretical physics, control theory, and thermodynamics interested in the most recent developments in sub-Riemannian geometry.